Loyola University ChicagoLoyola eCommons

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works Faculty Publications

10-2010

Recognition Within the Limits of Reason: Remarkson Pippin’s Hegel’s Practical PhilosophyDavid IngramLoyola University Chicago, dingram@luc.edu

Author ManuscriptThis is a pre-publication author manuscript of the final, published article.

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion inPhilosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contactecommons@luc.edu.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.© 2010 Taylor & Francis

Recommended CitationIngram, D."Recognition Within the Limits of Reason: Remarks on Pippin's Hegel's Practical Philosophy." Inquiry, 53(5), 2010:470-489.

Correspondence Address: David Ingram, Department of Philosophy, Loyola

University Chicago, 6525 N. Sheridan Rd., Chicago, IL 60660, USA. Email:

dingram@luc.edu

1

Recognition Within the Limits of Reason: Remarks on Pippin’s Hegel’s Practical

Philosophy

DAVID INGRAM

Loyola University Chicago, USA

Since the publication of Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism and the Politics of

Recognition in 1989,1 the concept of recognition has re-emerged as a central if not

dominant category of moral and political philosophy. Taylor’s use of Hegel’s seminal

category to defend group rights aimed at securing legal and public recognition of the

distinctive identities of groups resonated with critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas,

Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and above all Axel Honneth, who elevated the category of

recognition to the most foundational of moral and social categories.2 Honneth, for

example, drew on the research of developmental psychologists, such as Jessica Benjamin

and Donald Winnicott, as well as pragmatists, such as G. H. Mead, all of whom had used

the category of recognition to explain how a sense of self emerges from the empathetic

identification with primary caretakers.3 The accent here on social recognition as a

precognitive basis for individuation has been understood, in turn, as a condition for

psychological wholeness and well-being or, more radically, as a transcendental condition

for the possibility of any relation to the self whatsoever. In the meantime, critics – many

of them influenced by poststructuralists currents of thought – have argued that the

category of recognition, with its implied identification and reconciliation with the other,

designates an impossible and perhaps even undesirable achievement.4

2

Perhaps they are right. For now I wish only to raise an important challenge to the

dominant theories of recognition listed above, insofar as they claim to accurately reflect

Hegel’s view on the matter. In Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (2008), Robert Pippin

argues that Hegel’s mature concept of recognition is properly understood as an

ontological category referring exclusively to what it means to be a free, rational

individual, or agent.5 I agree with Pippin that recognition for Hegel functions in this

capacity. However, I shall argue that conceiving it this way also requires that we

conceive it as a political category in the sense described above. Furthermore, while Hegel

insists that recognition must be concrete – mediated by actors who hold one another

accountable according to institutional norms implicit in their actual social roles – I argue,

appealing to Hegel himself, that social crisis impels actors to transcend their roles and

adopt abstract points of view more in keeping with philosophical forms of reflection.

Such “alienation” – so ardently embraced by postmodernists – need not undermine the

possibility of recognition as an ontological category, as Pippin fears, but rather comports

with the expressivist theory of action he imputes to Hegel, which describes the socially

recognized intentions, rationales, and identities – not to mention, freedom - of actors as

unfolding in interminable dialog.

Pippin’s argument may be summarized as follows:

1. Action is not adequately identified and explained without appeal to actor’s

intentions.

2. Actor’s intentions are only manifest to him or her through other actors’

responses. One cannot be certain of what one has intended and what kind of a

3

person one is until after one has acted and one’s actions have been judged by

others.

3. The social interpretation of actor’s intentions unfolds when the actor is

challenged to justify his action with reasons that are recognized by others.

4. Such recognition is concrete, since the reasons in questions refer to

institutional norms that are accepted by everyone. Recognition between actors

implies mutual accountability but not strict equality in social status; nor does

it require that actors feel esteemed in the eyes of the other.

5. The agent’s successful justification of his action to others is what is properly

meant by freedom. Recognition thus functions principally as a minimal

condition for freedom, not as a transcendental condition for selfhood or

consciousness.

6. Reasons that refer to abstract ideas, purely formal norms, or hypothetical

(counterfactual) thought experiments that completely abstract from actual

institutional norms have no social basis and therefore cannot serve as grounds

for social justification and recognition.

7. Philosophy essentially offers reasons that are abstract, formal, and

hypothetical.

8. Therefore philosophy cannot enter into concrete social critique, informing us

about what we ought to do; when it goes against this proscription it presents

itself as potentially destructive. So philosophers cannot contribute to

extending our understanding of ourselves as free agents; viz., they cannot

4

enlighten us in a way we might recognize as normatively extending our

shared, institutional identities.

In what follows I shall accept premises 1-8 as positions that are properly

attributed to Hegel. Premise 6 strikes me as true only if one assumes that

counterfactual forms of reasoning completely abstract from actual institutional

norms. Premises 7-8 are likewise conditionally true, so that if it turns out to be the

case that social philosophy engages in formal and counterfactual forms of

reasoning that do not abstract from actual institutional norms, then they are false.

Premise 4 strikes me as partly questionable, since being accorded the status of

rational agent and fellow interlocutor is a form of esteem that is constrained by

relations of domination. Recognition therefore unavoidably carries with it a

political connotation.

I

Before delving into Pippin’s argument in detail, let me first begin by clarifying

what he means by saying that recognition is an ontological category. To say that

recognition is an ontological category does not imply that it is natural,

unchanging, and given all at once with the advent of human life. Insofar as Hegel

regards freedom, rationality, and individuality as historical achievements of the

human spirit, recognition, too, acquires for him the status of an historical

achievement. Therefore, it is not properly understood as a transcendental

5

condition for the bare possibility of subjectivity, selfhood, relation to self, or self-

consciousness, insofar as these capabilities can be attributed to children as well as

adult human beings prior to acquiring access to skill sets and institutional

opportunities associated with rational agency. For Hegel, recognition is simply a

necessary condition for the possibility of experiencing oneself as a free, rationally

accountable individual (HPP, 185).

Nor is Hegel’s notion of recognition a condition of psychic wellness and self-

esteem of the sort that figures in the political struggles for recognition discussed by

Taylor, Honneth and others. Indeed, Pippin insists that it is senseless to demand as a

political goal, or as a matter of right, the kind of recognition Hegel is talking about, for

that demand would be meaningless outside of any institution that hadn’t already

actualized mutual recognition among political agents. Rather, to the extent that Hegel

develops what Pippin calls a “recognitive politics” as an alternative to other liberal

political rationales of a consequentialist or rights-based nature, such a politics will be first

and foremost grounded in institutionally defined social roles, or shared identities

grounded in concrete universal norms (HPP, 242, 250, 258, 265).6

In sum, no matter how important recognition might be for personal psychological

health, basic self-awareness, and political justice between groups, it is not the sort of

recognition that Hegel philosophically defends as the telos of fully actualized action.

Indeed, according to Pippin, these psychological and political conceptions of recognition

are of a different caliber entirely. A group’s achieving mutual recognition from other

groups regarding the worth of its own members’ distinctive racial, gender, or cultural

6

identity may be a necessary condition for inter-group dialogue so essential to achieving

political justice, understood as equality in the legal and political distribution of social

esteem, say, but it is not, in Pippin’s reading of Hegel, a necessary condition for enabling

the group’s members to act in a rational and responsible manner as individual agents.

Likewise, achieving emotional bonding and identification with caretakers may be a

necessary developmental stage in the process of becoming a fully balanced human being,

and it may even well be that absent any such bonding at all infants could never become

persons who experience themselves as subjects who live in a meaningful world of

objects.7 But having been recognized in this precognitive, emotive or empathetic manner

of identification is not part of what it means to be a rational actor.

Pippin mentions another reason why conceptions of psychological fulfillment are

not central to Hegel’s philosophical project. That project consists in presenting and

defending a form of argument that is internal to free thought, or reason, itself, understood

as radically self-determining, socially embedded, mental life (Geist). This is not to deny

that there are natural - and to that extent, partly pre-rational – conditions underlying

thought and action. Hegel’s idealism does not require that he disregard the physical world

and its impact on empirical psychology. However, explanation of human agency cannot

be reduced to causal explanation without loss of its proper subject matter, which is

reason, or thought, as embodied in concrete action. To the extent that practical

philosophy forgets its proper form of idealism and adopts the external, observational and

objectifying standpoint of empirical psychology and anthropology, it does a profound

injustice to our inner understanding of ourselves as fully free, rationally accountable,

agents.

Deleted: ,

7

This explains Pippin’s discomfort with respect to left-Hegelian critiques of

alienation. Such examples of philosophical anthropology take us away from the Kantian

legacy back to a pre-critical Aristotelianism, where rational criticism relies upon an

account of human nature, understood as a prior constraint determining volition and

thought from without.8 But, according to Pippin, to view alienation as a state of

unfulfilled nature, as dehumanization, and recognition as restoration of psychic

wholeness and humanity, is to think of recognition as something that is natural, always

present in some form, however diminished, and thus as an original constraint rather than

as a freely accomplished result. This way of conceiving recognition goes against the grain

of Hegel’s thinking, which holds that the determinations of free action – recognition

included - must themselves be the product of action.

II

Now that we have clarified Pippin’s claim that Hegel’s concept of recognition is best

understood as an ontological presupposition, let’s look more closely at his argument

purporting to show this to be the case. Pippin’s main project is to defend what he

regards as Hegel’s highly counterintuitive notion of freedom against the apparently

intuitive traditional conception. The traditional conception conceives of freedom as a

causal power innate within the individual. In the empiricist tradition of Hobbes, Locke

and Hume, the will can be said to be free if its decision to pursue this or that desire is

unhindered by external impediment. The transcendentalist tradition inaugurated by Kant

goes further than this by reasonably insisting that the mere faculty of choice (Willkür)

provides a poor foundation for freedom so long as the rational, calculating will remains in

8

thrall to pre-rational inclination. But Kant’s idea of a spontaneous “uncaused” volitional

agency that inhabits some otherworldly noumenal realm while somehow acting in the real

world is scarcely philosophically satisfying. How can mere respect for an abstract and

empty conception of formal practical reason (the categorical imperative) motivate action,

i.e., provide sufficient reason to act this way rather than that, apart from worldly desire?

Hegel’s solution to this dilemma involves radically reconceiving the way in which

Kant’s idea of autonomy as self-legislation is understood. Instead of thinking of

autonomy as simply a function of individually exercised practical reasoning, Hegel thinks

of it as a dialogical accomplishment in which agents invest their desires in the rational

form of validity claims whose reasonableness they then justify to other agents in terms

that these other agents recognize and accept.

Hegel’s mature defense of this recognitive account of freedom (premises 1 -5

in my reconstruction) proceeds at many levels. In the Phenomenology, his attention is

focused on in the dialectical confrontation between the claims and counterclaims of forms

of consciousness. As is well known, the section of the Phenomenology in which Hegel

discusses the dialectic of self-consciousness (culminating in the relationship between

master and servant) disabuses us of any conceit in our own autochthony in its compelling

account of why natural self-consciousness cannot be free on its own. This account

rearticulates an earlier argument that Fiche had developed in his Grundlage des

Naturrechts (1796): to wit, that autonomy first arises when human beings distinguish

themselves from animals by transforming their immediate, natural desires into claims, or

demands, addressed to others and requiring their recognition. The opportunity to effect

this transformation thus depends on challenge from the other. The problem with the

9

master-servant relationship that supposedly resolves the existential struggle to the death

between persons who demand unreciprocated recognition of their freedom is its

incapacity to rise above the fundamental contradiction that recognition cannot be

compelled and, indeed, cannot affirm the superior sovereignty of one when given

unfreely from another who is deemed to be little more than an object. Although the

servant achieves a certain awareness of his own freedom in fearing death, postponing

satisfaction of natural need, and dominating nature through labor, neither he nor the lord

can achieve subjective certainty of their autonomy and, indeed, cannot be free, because

they lack the moral, legal, and ethical preconditions in which they might transform their

immediate demands into rationally justifiable validity claims requiring mutual

recognition.

This recognitive account of freedom is first developed by Hegel in a later

section of the Phenomenology devoted to action as an expression of intention that has

significance for others. In the section concluding the chapter on reason, entitled

“Individuality which Takes Itself to be Real in and for Itself,” we learn “that a person

cannot know what he [really] is until he has made himself a reality through action” (para

401). The “purpose” and “matter at hand” in his acting, however, comes to light only as it

is expressed and taken up by others, thereby showing that the pure integrity of one’s

willing is a chimera. Agents may “pretend that their actions and efforts are something for

themselves alone in which they have only themselves and their essential nature in mind,”

but “in doing something, and thus in bringing themselves out into the light of day, they

directly contradict by their deed their pretense of wanting to exclude the glare of publicity

and participation by all and sundry” (para. 417).

10

Finally, in chapter six, subsection (c) entitled “Spirit that is Certain of Itself:

Morality,” we encounter this dialectic of rudimentary communicative interaction played

out on a higher register – the register of social critique, if you will. Dealing not with the

abstract determinants of rational action (means and ends) but with the ostensible purity of

moral conscience, Hegel emphatically shows that the subjective convictions of moral

agents remain essentially incomplete and indeterminate in meaning – lacking in

conviction and objective reality - until they are expressed in actions and not only declared

in a self-validating way but justified convincingly with reasons before other persons

whom the actor recognizes as having the right to judge (paras. 645, 653). Although the

forms of consciousness that inhabit this moral world only recognize their own subjective

convictions - the result of having seen behind the emptiness of applying a Kantian

universal law of reason that transcends any determinate subjective prescription - there is

a sense in which each asserts his own convictions as normatively binding for everyone

else, as if one’s inner voice had the same authority as God’s command (paras. 655-56).9

Acting as if his subjective conviction were universally binding for society, the spectator-

judge (who, for the purposes of this essay, can be compared to the inactive philosopher-

social critic or inactive community of political deliberators) accuses the acting agent of

hypocrisy by showing that the meaning of the agent’s actions is not, contrary to the

agent’s beliefs, exhausted by the agent’s claimed moral intentions, since from the

subjective perspective of the judge’s convictions, these actions appear to have been

morally motivated by such evil, egocentric desires as fame and ambition (para. 665). But

in coaxing a confession of wrong from the agent, the hard-hearted judge - who in playing

the “beautiful soul” refuses to act for fear of getting her own hands dirty - can scarcely be

Deleted: pursuant to Kant’s recommendation

Deleted: are

Deleted: his

11

said to claim with convincing conviction that she and not the actor is right, and indeed

can also be accused of hypocrisy for betraying a commitment to universal right by

withdrawing into the inner sanctum of her own subjective self-certainty (paras 658, 663-

65). Forgiveness comes when both actor and judge mutually confess their hypocrisy and

recognize their mutual accountability to one another in the course of both simultaneously

playing out the dual role of actor and judge. Realizing that deliberative judgments and

action-oriented convictions must be backed by reasons that can be communicated to and

validated by others heals the wounds of past recrimination, for it enables actor and judge

to acknowledge the inextricable connection between subjective conviction and social

recognition, acting out of singular self-interest and reconciling that rationale with a social

judgment affirming that rationale’s universal worth (paras. 667-71).

To paraphrase the moral of this story in a way that Hegel might have accepted

had he lived in our post-Wittgensteinian world, we could say that the reasons given by

agents for acting and judging do not count as reasons unless they can enter into a

language game of challenge and justification in which they are recognized as compelling

by others. Any gap between agent’s and judge’s assessment of what the agent did marks a

gap in recognition and, therewith, a gap in the agent’s own certainty that what he or she

thought she did is what he or she did in fact; and that experience of self-alienation is

tantamount to an experience of unfreedom, or absence of self-determination.10

Pippin relies on Hegel’s mature writings in the Philosophy of Right and in the

Encyclopedia to flesh out the implications of this conception of recognitive freedom

further. The important points developed in these writings are as follows: If freedom, or

taking ownership of one’s inclinations, volitions, and intentions – requires transforming

Deleted: he

Deleted: his

12

these subjective events into rationally justifiable validity claims addressed to and

recognized by others (as Habermas would say) – then it also requires an intersubjectively

recognized framework in which asserting and redeeming individual claims makes sense.

That framework is the modern state, understood not merely as government but as shared

political understanding firmly anchored in what we today would loosely identify as a

liberal and democratic ethos. In other words, it is only within a modern state that

objectively recognizes individual freedom and responsibility through legal institutions

such as private property, accountable legislative representation, and so on and further

grounds these formal institutions in substantive traditions expressing common values,

aims, and meanings as well as concrete narrative identities based on intersubjectively

recognized roles, that something like genuine individual self-ownership can happen.

A further point bears mentioning with regard to this institutional conception of

practical reason. Justification will be constrained by – or, to put in the more positive

terms favored by Pippin and Hegel, reconciled to – particular social roles and functions;

in other words, justification will not be free to methodically detach itself from these roles

as if aspiring to become a formal test for determining how any rational speaker or hearer

or actor or judge would justify the action in question.

[T]he reflection and deliberation essential to such a subjective dimension (the

entertaining of considerations about what one ought to do) are not formalizable,

do not involve a method or permanent set of moral rules or a moral law or any

sort of moral calculation. One deliberates, as he [Hegel] says, “qua ethical being”

(sittliches Wesen). This means that considerations such as “because I am her

Deleted: a

Deleted: Two

Deleted: s

Deleted: The first is that j

13

father” or “because that is what a good businessman does,” or “you cannot,

because that is my property,” or “because I am a citizen” simply are practical

reasons. They are not initial steps requiring a full deduction of a further claim

that, say, one ought always to do as is required of a modern citizen of a

Rechtsstaat, all before a subjectively offered reason could really be convincing or

successful. The Kantian conception of autonomy and rationality that supports

such an intuition is, Hegel claims, a dangerous fantasy (HPP, 274).

The philosopher’s temptation to think that there must be some more general, abstract

reason supporting the social functional reasons proffered by everyday agents is simply

mistaken, for such a reason could not provide a motive for acting that would be more

concretely meaningful and prescriptive than the reason institutionally provided. Thus,

Habermas’s formal pragmatic account of accountability, in which actors also play

institutionally unconstrained abstract social roles of speaker and listener apart from their

institutionally constrained social roles of, say, doctor and patient, adds nothing to the

sorts of specific claims and justifications that a doctor might raise or make with respect to

a patient. In justifying the truth of a diagnosis or the rightness of a prescribed regimen of

care to the patient the doctor should not have to appeal to a general theory of knowledge

or a general moral theory. “Grounded in controlled observation” or “cost-beneficial” or

“in accordance with respecting the inherent dignity of the human being” are not reasons

that would conceivably justify a concrete judgment taken in abstraction from the

particular institutional context.11

Radically questioning the truth of science or the

appropriateness of medical practice is merely the idle fancy of philosophers who are free

14

to adopt wholly abstract and transcendent notions of rational justification, truth, and

rightness in their “professional” capacity as purely rational speakers and listeners,

unencumbered by the constraints of action.

III

We are now in a position to restate premises 6-8 of Hegel’s argument. Pippin’s

Hegel thinks that the recognitive nature of historically situated rational agency limits the

kinds of reasons we can bring to bear in criticizing social institutions, in two respects.

According to Pippin’s Hegel, we are not entitled, as rational agents, to engage in

hypothetical (or counterfactual) arguments, if the form the argument takes is that we

could not consent to these institutions as purely rational beings, viz., beings whom we

imagine are free to reason without being constrained in their thinking by actual social

institutions.12

This kind of thought experiment is either vacuous or meaningful in a

dangerous way, in that it invites individuals to imagine that they are being impartial

when they are in fact imposing their own subjective opinions on the rest of us without so

much as making a token gesture on behalf of what the rest of us, who participate in and

identify with society and its norms, might think.

Such formal reasoning – with its implicit subjectivism and volunteerism –is the

reverse side of that pre-critical, substantive reasoning advanced by Aristotelians. This

reasoning, which rejects the formalist appeal to ideal procedure in favor of an intuitive

appeal to substantive human capacities, implies a form of moral realism that contradicts

the self-legislating nature of rational moral agency. 13

15

So both formal and substantive criticism, Pippin maintains, would be regarded by

Hegel as “external” to the internal, participatory standpoint of rational agents whose

justificatory reasons are in some important sense determined (or delimited) by the

concrete logical space of the historically finite ethical life (Sittlichkeit) they inhabit. If

the justificatory reasons for social critique proffered by contractarian proceduralists and

communitarian realists are ruled out as philosophically incoherent and practically

“dangerous” (perhaps even “pathological,” as Pippin sometimes suggests), it might then

seem that Pippin’s Hegel could at least allow reasons that criticize the existing ethos

immanently, for failing to live up to its underlying telos (or idea). This is true for Hegel,

but only with qualification: we cannot understand such reasons as including a claim that

individuals are entitled by right to such an ethos.

According to Pippin’s Hegel, to demand as a right the actualization of the social

conditions underlying one’s agency – where such conditions are understood to include

the having of rights - is philosophically incoherent, in that it “puts the cart before the

horse” (HPP, 257). It makes no sense to claim a right to the presuppositions for claiming

a right. Claiming a right to the presuppositions for a claiming a right would lead us down

a bottomless pit of demands. Furthermore, the presupposition for claiming rights –

mutual, unconstrained recognition between persons who hold one another accountable as

claimants – is not the sort of thing that can be legally enforced in the way that rights

claims must be if they are to count as rights. How does one compel free recognition of a

claim without committing a performative contradiction?14

Once again, recognition is here seen as an ontological condition, not an object of

political struggle undertaken in the name of advancing rights, even though recognition

16

itself plainly rests on a political institution incorporating the principle of rights. However,

if the ordinary political activity of claiming and justifying rights is not what originally

brings the principle of rights into existence in the first place, it might be asked: What is?

For Hegel, that answer, of course, is history. It is history – not abstract reason – that

justifies this activity; and it is historical, dialectical philosophy – not abstract,

counterfactual philosophy – that interprets the logical course of events.

IV

I will examine whether Hegel’s historical justification of modern rights – as stated above

– is sufficiently dialectical and convincing. Presently I wish to focus on another question:

Can Pippin’s Hegel consistently exclude abstract, counterfactual reasoning from the

recognized play of practical arguments in everyday life? A glance at Pippin’s favorable

comparison between Hegel’s account of concrete rational accountability and that

contained in Robert Brandom’s Making it Explicit (1994) suggests that it cannot.

Brandom’s inferentialist account of action posits intersubjectivity as a prior

condition of rational agency. Persons hold one another accountable for the commitments

that can be inferred from the assertions they make about themselves, others, and the

world around them as they interact with others. They are entitled to these commitments

only to the extent that others can rely on them in fashioning their own commitments. But

Brandom understands the role that communication plays in this process as mainly

17

passive; we listen to what others say, observe what they do, and keep score of who is

committed to what, being ever vigilant to ferret out conflicting or inconsistent

commitments. It is important for me to be able to take over another’s commitment,

although doing so does not guarantee that what I and that other person understand by that

commitment is identical (for each of us inserts that claim into our own unique inferential

system of commitments).

Importantly, in Brandom’s account of accountability, agreement in

understanding is not a full-bodied dialogical achievement of the sort that Pippin attributes

to Hegel recognitive account of freedom. On Brandom’s account, entitlement to a

commitment will depend on consistency with the dominant commitments of one’s

society. But entitlement in this sense can be determined by simple observation, in the

same way that a jury (to cite Habermas) keeps a tally of the points scored by the

defendant and the plaintiff in a trial.15

Nothing in Brandom’s account of entitlement

requires that agents actively acquire assent from others by justifying their commitments

in the face of direct challenges.

On the other hand, Brandom’s commitment to objectivity and truth should

incline him to embrace a more robustly dialogical rendering of entitlement.16

Achieving

objectivity in one's understanding would seem to require testing one's taken-for-granted,

subjectively held assumptions in the crucible of dialogical questioning. Furthermore, in

asserting our claim to be valid as a matter of objective truth we imply that all persons

could be rationally persuaded to accept it. Of course, we cannot assume that any given

dialogical exchange of arguments would ever suffice to exhaustively justify the truth of

any controversial claim once and for all. Real dialogs are imperfect vehicles for

18

conclusively establishing anything, since there are always arguments and points of view

that have not been expressed. This has led Habermas to conclude that the idea of truth

anticipates a temporally unlimited, viz., fully inclusive, fully free, and fully equal

exchange of arguments, what he sometimes refers to as the ideal speech situation.17

The implication of this counterfactual ideal notion of dialogical accountability for

a recognitive theory of practical reason would seem to be something of the following:

Being able to recognize oneself as a fully rational agent depends on recognition from

others who relate to one in the dialogical role of “equal interlocutor,” but such

recognition appears to be, in retrospect, always constrained and temporally incomplete.

This accords with Pippin’s expressivist view of action: full self-certainty – or full self-

ownership – of what one is doing depends on what an indefinite number of our fellow

interlocutors decides one is doing according to an ever-changing matrix of shared

reasons. One’s agreement with others in this open-ended process of dialogue would be

achievable, if we can be forgiven the expression, only in the fullness of time itself. One's

rationale for one's actions may be recognized by others sufficient to permit a modicum of

rational self-certainty, but this recognition could not in principle be conclusive, because

the ideal preconditions under which it could be met are never given.

V

Recognition thus appears to be simultaneously factual and counterfactual, given but, in

retrospect, not fully so. Because it is not given, it cannot be accomplished within the

parameters of finite ethical life, if what one understands by ethical life is time-bound

conventional reason. But this conclusion would appear to contradict Hegel’s own

19

optimistic claims about the fully realized fact of freedom for those participating in the

actual institutions that make up the modern state.18

What these claims suggest is a

complete reconciliation with the modern state as it currently exists, based on

unshakeable, viz., final and absolute, reasons about who we are and what we are doing.

Such triumphalism has led Honneth and Habermas, for instance, to conclude that Hegel

jettisoned the forward-looking, dialogical account of rational justification so strikingly

evident in his System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit dating back to 1802-

04 for the backward-looking, monological justification present in the Jena

Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807. Beginning with this latter work, Hegel putatively

defends the absolute incarnation of reason; viz., a final true understanding of ourselves as

completely free, by direct appeal to humanity’s inevitable, divine-like march to the

modern state, behind the backs of agents and quite independently of any dialogical

reflection they might have undertaken in enlightening themselves about the imperfect

rationality of their social relations.19

One therefore suspects that the cunning of reason (List der Vernunft), as Hegel

understands the developmental logic underlying history, has its own rationale that far

exceeds the reasons of finite acting subjects. To say that this rationale compels

submission - on pain of one’s being rendered less of a rational agent – suggests that a

person could not in principle freely and with reason elect to excuse himself or herself

from the prevailing discourses in which he or she is expected to render a rational account.

From the standpoint of the radical dissident who questions the presumed freedom,

symmetry and consensuality of rational dialog as well as the impartiality of the dominant

20

lingua franca, the expectation that he or she give rational account to others might well

appear to be an unreasonable – externally imposed – demand.

. Now, Pippin might respond to this objection in the following way (HPP, 276).

Unless one buys into the implausible view that norms, such as the equality of all persons

as bearers of fundamental rights, are facts of reason that have existed in all societies since

time immemorial, albeit in partial or distorted, or unclear form, then one is inescapably

thrown back onto some grand narrative about historical progress in justifying such norms.

Common knowledge has it that Hegel here commits a kind of genetic fallacy; that

he conflates historical necessity, historical possibility, or historical facticity with what is

morally right. But the normative ethos that informs our modern understanding of what it

means to be rational is not simply the result of a kind of natural fate or metaphysical

cunning of reason, as my earlier objection would have it. Following Pippin’s reading,

Hegel seems to be distinguishing between a developmental logic – the telos of collective

action, if you will – and its actual historical realization. Because the telos of collective

action can be philosophically discerned only after the fact of its substantial if indeed

imperfect actualization, it cannot be what motivates (behind the backs of historical

agents) its own realization. Rather, that work is the achievement of historical “agents” or

persons who are on the way to becoming agents in the fullest sense of the term.

So the proper way to interpret Hegel’s account of the actualization of reason is

to stress the role that imperfectly rational social agents play in “freely” constituting, in

some unintended way, their own agency across time. The fuller meaning of their action

unfolds over time, with the philosopher as interlocutor-judge dialogically questioning and

partly contributing to the action’s objective meaning. Although, as our discussion of

Deleted: timeless moral

21

moral conscience shows, the philosopher judge cannot be a mere spectator, but must also

act and be held accountable to the historical agents whose actions she in turn is judging –

to recall Marx’s famous third thesis on Feuerbach, the educator must be educated by

those s/he educates – the philosopher nonetheless acts in a distinctly theoretical; viz.,

philosophical way. From the retrospective standpoint of the philosopher, history can be

interpreted as if it were the culmination of a developmental logic. Following Pippin’s

reading of Hegel, that logic itself does not pre-exist the actions of historically agents, as

though in the beginning that logic, rather than their incompletely actualized, still all-too-

subjective intentions causally explained their actions. Rather, we are to understand that

incipient intentional actions, with their still undeveloped practices of mutual

accountability unintentionally produced, through aggregate effects extending across

many generations, something that we today recognize as more fully intentional and

rationally individuated activity.

VI

This account of reflective action guiding its own self-actualization has much to

recommend it. But we still need an account of social crisis that explains how such action

arises, with all of its progressive, emancipatory potential. Take the example of the

dissident who refuses to reason about society in the way that conventional roles would

dictate. Hegel is not claiming that one must always account for one’s action by appeal to

conventional roles, least of all when the rules and terms of the game of rational dialog are

suspected of being less rational than what they purport to be. This situation arises in

moments of social breakdown, when our ethical identity is shattered and we seem torn

Deleted: explained

Deleted: , embedded in incipient reason-giving

Deleted: in which incipient individuals hold one another accountable in an incipient way,

Deleted: – partly thanks to philosophers like Hegel -

Deleted: social life

22

between conflicting social roles. Hegel’s famous gloss on Sophocles’ portrayal of the

conflict between Creon and Antigone in the Phenomenology illustrates the breakdown of

an imperfectly rational ethos in which roles of citizen and family member cannot be

harmonized because neither citizen nor family member can give a satisfactory rationale to

the other that could justify what he or she is doing. Contrast this breakdown with our

modern form of social crisis. In a modern society that has incorporated robust rational

accountability all the way down to its core, individuals identify with their multiple social

roles less rigidly and dogmatically. Our cultural conflicts don’t lead to a wholesale

abandonment of rational accountability toward others, even if they produce skepticism

and alienation. Such skepticism now appears to be reasonable to the extent that

questioning oneself – impelled by challenges from others –is “natural” and finds

institutional support. One draws from science in questioning law; or one draws from

religion in questioning science. It doesn’t matter that the sources of socially recognized

reasons aren’t strictly universal, so long as there remains at least one overarching

institutional support – such as respect for basic human rights – that is. When respect for

abstract morality and its concrete embodiment in the concrete civil and political rights of

a particular nation diminishes – as is the case with modern forms of ideological

fundamentalism – so does respect for modern reason.

So defending Hegel against the charge of conservatism is certainly possible

when we realize that abstract moral reflection itself is institutionalized in modern

societies for whom social crisis itself has become a permanent, if somewhat tamed,

condition. Again, suppose one of the instituted language games in our society is a

language of human rights that functions, in part, as a common basis for holding other

23

nations rationally accountable and, in part, as a common lingua franca for disputing and

resolving moral claims between rival religious and secular groups. Persons who are asked

to render an account of their behavior in terms of the reasons afforded by this language

game are asked to do so in ways that any rational human being might accept. The

universal validity they claim for their reasoning will require that they abstract from the

particular ethos they inhabit, or at the very least, hypothetically imagine the possibility of

such abstraction. That is to say, they must be able to hypothetically free themselves from

the limits of their own ethos and even (perhaps) radically question this ethos.

Now, Hegel might reserve the right of the philosopher to hypothetically

question say, the modern enlightenment ethos, as he and generations of critical theorists

have done; but like the late Wittgenstein, he probably wouldn’t deem this to be an

entirely appropriate reflection on the part of everyday citizens.20

Note that the problem

with this kind of totalizing ethical reflection has nothing to do with foundationalism.

Radical questioning doesn’t require suspending all our practical judgments at once.

Having exorcised the bogeyman of presuppositionless certainty, we can still question our

ethos dialectically, from within its circular course of reasoning. Rawls, for example,

never denied that his counterfactual contractarian thought experiment, which was aimed

at extrapolating general principles of justice for criticizing society, was anything more

than a stylized rational reconstruction of commonly shared fixed judgments with respect

to the acceptability or unacceptability of particular practices.

Regardless, then, of whether one agrees with Rawls’s theory of justice and his

peculiar framing of the argument in support of it, the counterfactual reasoning it exhibits

is not obviously alien to our modern ethos. Therefore, conceding that average citizens,

24

too, can be entitled to a fair share of reasonable philosophical skepticism as their modern

birthright, it seems unclear why Hegel would reprimand them for demanding the

actualization of that ethos. If the answer is that doing so would enmesh them in some

kind of self-referential paradox of the sort that Russell and other analytic logicians were

keen on exposing, then that response would surely be one that a dialectician such as

Hegel should be wary of giving. If the circular relationship between condition and

conditioned, part and whole, subject and object exhibited a good and proper modality of

infinite reflection – rather than a bad infinite regress of the sort that foundational

reasoning enmeshes us in – then Hegel would have no grounds for complaint.

VII

So what is Hegel’s beef with liberalism’s empowerment of individual moral

conscience? Hegel does not mean to extinguish the individual moral agent’s legitimate

right to demand rational justification of what contingently exists. The danger in such a

demand – what makes it unreasonable and pathological – is its absolute withdrawal from

the public realm of social accountability into the private realm of fanatical self-certainty.

Pathological is the self-imposed alienation and self-reification that comes from forgetting

or willfully denying, in an act of bad faith, the social preconditions underlying one’s own

claim to be rationally certain and justified. As noted above, this kind of pathology is not

inherent within counterfactual forms of moral reasoning. Even the apparently

monological thought experiments deployed by Rawls - and even (somewhat surprisingly)

by no less a critic of monological critique as Habermas himself - have a dialogical side,

25

as both of these thinkers have emphatically reminded us.21

But this fact about psycho-

social pathology underscores yet another problem in Pippin’s reading of Hegel, which is

that recognition cannot be entirely divorced from considerations of esteem and

fulfillment that Honneth and others consider integral to that account. Hegel’s endearing

epithets for pathological withdrawal from society into the inner recesses of self-certainty

- “unhappy consciousness,” “hypocrisy,” “beautiful soul,” “fanaticism,” and “absolute

terror” - suggest that the highway of despair traversed in his phenomenology of spiritual

enlightenment goes well beyond the philosophical experience of performative self-

contradiction to encompass a personally felt identity crisis. In fact, freedom

recognitively redefined is just another word for being affirmed and esteemed by one’s

fellow consociates as a fully accountable, responsible agent. What is rationally good and

rationally right converge, so that autonomy does not come at the expense of

psychological satisfaction and fulfillment.

VIII

To be sure, there is much wanting in Hegel’s account of modernity. Aside

from its Eurocentrism, its whiggish, triumphal account of human freedom collides with

our post-Foucauldian understanding of how meaning and identity are constituted and

constrained by hidden power relations. This understanding brings to bear a distinctly

modern skepticism that is not without a trace of that dangerous philosophical abstraction

which Hegel so strongly criticized. Indeed I would venture to say that the philosopher

today, in the form of the postmodern author, conceptual artist, or editorial columnist, has

become a world historical agent, and not - as in the case of Socrates – a mere symptom of

Deleted: Hegel’s account of recognition

Deleted: it

26

crisis and decline. We moderns have become philosophical actors, reflecting from a

distance on the meaning of who we are and what we are doing. Our interminable project

of actualizing our free agency in dialogical confrontation with the other condemns us to

self-uncertainty in a way that Hegel, perhaps, had but an inkling.

Indeed, it might be argued these days that our existential ethics of freedom

as authentic self-ownership is as much anti-subjective as it is subjective, confirming the

worst of Hegel’s fears. But the counterfactual, aesthetic imaginary behind such efforts of

go-it-alone self-affirmation (or go-with-the-flow self-denial) is probably, as Hegel

suspected, ontologically rooted in the mundane political ethos wherein we still seek

recognition from others, come what may. The delusions of a few Robespierres and

Nietzsche-inspired futurists notwithstanding, the revolutionary experiments in fascist and

communist social engineering of the modern era are less a testimony to philosophical

imagination gone amuck than they are a reflection of a pathological ethos that has failed

to break away from the habits of long-standing tradition. Pippin himself concedes this

point when discussing the counterfactual thought-experiments proposed by Kantians like

Rawls and Habermas. True to Hegel’s thinking, these thinkers appealed to historical

arguments in showing how the moral intuitions of European-descended peoples were

rational responses to four hundred years of religious and class struggle. Their thought

experiments were thus only devices for reconstructively clarifying (rather than justifying)

modern substantive ethical intuitions. That said, it was precisely these types of

generalizing interpretations and their accompanying counterfactual idealizations that

inspired women, workers, and marginalized minorities to imagine otherwise the dominant

institutional roles preventing them from being recognized as full-fledged agents in the

Deleted: Rawls eventually had recourse

to a historical method of justification

Deleted: His contractarian thought

experiment was but a device for reconstructively clarifying (rather than

justifyin

Deleted: g) these

Deleted: It was counterfactual reasoning of this philosophical kind t

27

game of rational deliberation. All of which suggests that the struggle for recognition is

not so far removed from that mutual dialogical questioning that marks recognitive

political life in Pippin’s sense of the term.

1 C. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the

Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25-73.

2 See J. Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel and Back Again,” in Truth and Justification (Cambridge,

MA: MIT, 2003), pp. 190- 202; “Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism” in

Between Naturalism and Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), esp. pp. 293-96; “Struggles for

Recognition in the Democratic State” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory

(Cambridge, MA: 1998), pp. 203-36; A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of

Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: 1996); A. Honneth and N. Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition: A

Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003); S. Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender,

Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (London: Routledge, 1992); The Claims of

Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002),

3 J. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Power (New

York: Pantheon, 1988); D. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitation of the Environment:

Deleted: politics of rec

28

Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of

Psychoanalysis, 1965).

4 See Lois McNay, Against Recognition (London: Polity Press, 2008) and Ralph Shain, “Is

Recognition a Zero-Sum Game?” in Telos (Summer 2008), pp. 63-87. The postructuralist attack on

recognition is problematic in that it asks us to bracket our shared, normative understanding of ourselves as

participants in trustworthy social interactions in which we feel respected and affirmed by others. It may

well be that our desire for recognition is a desideratum for reasons mentioned below. But the rejection of

recognition as something wholly illusory and ideological is surely misplaced.

5 R. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency and Ethical Life (Cambridge:

Cambridge University, 2008 – hereafter HPP), p. 259.

6 See Hegel’s remark that “rationality consists in general in the unity and interpenetration of universality

and individuality” in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991 – hereafter PR), p. 276, and his claim that “every individual has his

station in life, and he is fully aware of what constitutes a right and honorable course of action” in

Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1975 hereafter LPWH), p. 80 (cited in HPP at 259 and 242, respectively).

Hegel’s point, of course, is not that consequences and rights never count as legitimate political reasons but

that they do so only as qualified from the standpoint of some socially recognized role and its proper

standpoint.

7 For a discussion concerning the importance of emotional bonding to the achievement of

perspective sharing and objective experience, see Michael Tomosello, The Cultural Origins of Human

Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), Peter Hobson, The Cradle of Thought:

Exploring the origins of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and A. Honneth, Reification: A

New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008).

8 Pippin holds that Left-Hegelians (presumably Marx and Feuerbach) see the unfolding of human capacities

as a process of labor, rather than as an expansion of the “space of reasons” (HPP, 60-61). This overly

naturalistic interpretation of reason (which does not decisively distinguish humans from other primates, for

instance) is also implicated in the kind of quasi-Aristotelian teleology that Left-Hegelians ostensibly

29

endorse (229). Interestingly, these criticisms parallel those developed by Habermas and second-generation

critical theorists, who maintain that the progressive institutionalization of communicative rationality is the

primary engine for the reflective development of instrumental reason. See Habermas’s critique of Marx in

Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), ch. 3. The charge that Marx’s Left-

Hegelianism was only neo-Aristotelian overlooks the extent to which he was also influenced by

Rousseau’s (and Kant’s) notion of freedom, understood as self-legislation. See, for example, his famous

reference to Rousseau in Zur Judenfrage.

9 I thank Ardis Collins for suggesting this interpretation of the relevant passages. For an

alternative reading that postulates not a society of moral subjectivists but a society of

moral universalists, each of whom identifies the universal with either his own subjective

moral conviction or his own abstract political deliberation (freely achieved in tandem

with other like-minded souls), see Jay M. Bernstein, “Conscience and Transgression:

The Persistence of Misrecognition, ” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain No.

29 (1994), 55-70; and “Confession and Forgiveness: Hegel’s poetics of action,” in

Beyond representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, ed. Richard Eldridge

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Bernstein interprets the “beautiful

soul” as standing in for a “deliberative community” that produces agreement on norms in

abstraction from ethical action, while he interprets the conscientious actor as one who

acts out of individual conviction without considering how the consequences of his actions

impact the community (1996, 36-38). Bernstein then compares this dialectic to that

contained in Hegel’s treatment of Antigone and Creon, and concludes that the

Phenomenology effectively ends when both the conscientious actor and the beautiful soul

recognize the truth of the “absolute other,” viz., the prior context of shared ethical norms

that frames their one-sided forms of understanding. For Bernstein, this result rules out

Deleted: As Collins notes,

30

any good-faith effort to act against or rise above society’s norms, either morally or

politically. According to Collins’ very different reading of this passage, the overcoming

of abstract subjectivism and politicization “drained of any content” requires a move

beyond morality to religion. .

10 Hegel’s reasoning here is certainly not foreign to what some philosophers of criminal

law have thought to be necessary for attributing liability. The assignment of criminal

liability based solely on subjective criteria is especially tempting in the area of law

concerning so-called attempted crime. However, holding someone liable simply on the

basis of their intention to commit a crime, in the absence of any outward criminal

activity, founders empirically (what evidence there might be is wholly circumstantial or

based on subjective testimony of others) and it founders conceptually (the question arises:

in respecting the freedom of the would-be malefactor to suddenly repent and change his

or her mind before actually committing the crime, how long must we wait before we

conclude that the point of no return has been reached in the intending of a not-yet-

completed act?). Holding someone liable on the basis of their character alone, apart from

intentions and actions, is equally problematic; by targeting the merely potential

criminality of character we are led down a slippery slope toward forms of preventive

criminal intervention (detention, interdiction, etc.) that are far removed from our ordinary

understanding of the retributive (agency respecting) aim of criminal law and punishment.

What is required, instead, is an account of criminal attempts that ties these subjective

components taken together (intentions as a reflection of a criminal character; character as

a product of intentions, choices, and volitions) to objective actions (past and present) as

direct expressions (embodiments) of character/intention. For a theory that defends this

Deleted: be

31

kind of Hegelian solution, see R.A. Duff, Criminal Attempts (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1996).

11 Habermas distinguishes institutionally unbound speech acts that raise universal validity claims to truth,

rightness, and sincerity, from institutionally bound speech acts that raise non-generalizable claims whose

authority seems attached to particular social roles and functions (see J. Habermas, “What is Universal

Pragmatics,” in On the Pragmatics of Communication [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998]). Hegel’s claim

is that such general appeals to the social roles of a purely rational and unencumbered speaker and listener

(or to truth and rightness) in abstraction from specific institutionalized practices are ineffective at best and

dangerous at worst. However, Habermas’s use of Toulmin’s scheme of informal argumentation, which he

develops in “Wahrheitstheorien” (reprinted in Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des

kommunikativen Handelns [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984]) is presented as an alternative to deductive forms

of reasoning that (in moral philosophy) typically proceed from some general axiom to a particular practical

judgment. Nonetheless, Habermas allows that purely rational interlocutors are free to radicalize the demand

for justification extending all they way down to the institutionalized medium of speech itself.

12 Although I argue toward the conclusion of my paper that Rawls cannot be accused of entertaining such a

historically transcendent form of criticism, others influenced by Rawls stand so indicted. See, for example,

the method of “historical counterfactualizing” developed by Anita Silvers in criticizing discrimination

against the disabled and Thomas Pogge’s critique of this method. S. Anita, “Formal Justice,” in A. Silvers,

D. Wasserman, and M. B. Mahowald (eds.), Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice

in Bio-Ethics and Public Policy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), pp. 32, 74, 129; and T.

Pogge, “Justice for People with Disabilities: The Semi-Consequentialist Approach,” in L. P. Francis and A

Silvers (eds.), Americans with Disabilities: Exploring Implications of the Law for Individuals and

Institutions (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 34-53 (esp. 38-42).

13 ‘Without a possible Aristotelian appeal to the realization of natural capacities in order to establish when

one is really acting in practically rational ways (realizing one’s natural potential as a rational animal) and

without an appeal to a formal criterion of genuinely rational self-determination, this turns out to be the only

criterion left: one is an agent in being recognized as, responded to as, an agent; one can be so recognized if

32

the justifying norms appealed to in the practice of treating each other as agents can actually function within

that community as justifying,, can be offered and accepted (recognized) as justifying” (HPP, 198-99)

14 This argument, to be sure, plays on an essential connection between rights and claims, and between

moral rights and fully (objectively) actualized legal claims. This Hegelian way of framing the category of

right would be disputed by Kantians of a certain sort, who would regard rights, ideally speaking, as

practical aspirations, or desiderata, to be striven for, which in fact happens to be the way in which human

rights are affirmed in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

15 J. Habermas, Truth and Justification (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p 163.

16 For Brandom it is reason as socially instituted norm that factually obliges persons to think a certain way,

not reason as a counterfactual regulative ideal that directs them to criticize established ways of thinking as

such (Truth and Justification, p. 140). In this respect, as Cristina Lafont argues, it is not always clear

whether, for Brandom, objectivity really is (as he says) a structural presupposition of language use that

forces speakers to adopt an autonomous standpoint critical of any de facto social consensus or whether it is

simply the outcome of deferring to such an “authoritative” consensus as a matter of social necessity. As

Brandom himself remarks in his reply to Habermas:

The acknowledgement of the existence of conceptually structured facts to which our practices

(according to us) answer . . . is not meant to have any explanatory value except what can be cashed

out in terms of the deontic and social-perspectival articulation of our discursive practices [and so] .

. . it is not intended to explain so much as the possibility of that articulation -rather the other way

around [(“Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts: A Reply to Habermas,” European Journal of

Philosophy 8 [2000], p. 360)]

Merging rationality, objectivity, normativity, and truth into a factually preexisting social perspective,

Brandom abandons his Kantian transcendentalism in favor of Hegelian idealism. His belief that “fact-

stating talk is explained in normative terms and normative facts emerge as one kind of fact among others”

thus commits him to both conceptual and moral realism, a position that Habermas strongly rejects (Making

it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1994], p. 625; Habermas, Truth and Justification, p. 168). See C. Lafont, “Is Objectivity

33

Perspectival? Reflexions on Brandom’s and Habermas’s Pragmatist Conceptions of Objectivity,” in

Habermas and Pragmatism, ed. M. Aboulafia, M. Bookman, and C. Kemp (New York: Routledge, 2002),

pp. 185-209; and my Habermas: Introduction and Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press),

Appendix C.

17 TJ, 248.

18 The exception to this optimistic claim would be the property-less and unemployed poor, what Hegel calls

“the rabble” (Pöbel), that occupy the unincorporated margins of Hegel’s market-driven civil society.

19 For early statements of this position, see J. Habermas, “Labor and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena

Philosophy of Mind,” in J. Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston, Beacon press, 1973), p. 167; and J.

Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, chs 1 and 2. For later versions of the same see J. Habermas,

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 39-

42; Truth and Justification, pp. 202-211. The locus classicus of this argument in Honneth’s writings is

contained in The Struggle for Recognition, pp. 59-63.

20 Pippin concludes chapter 9 of HPP with the provocative claim that “Marx was right about Hegel. . . . The

point of philosophy for Hegel is to comprehend the world, not to change it, and this for a simple reason

Marx never properly understood: it can’t“ (HPP, 272) Pippin later clarifies this remark by adding “[the]

objection [that a functional, role-based reason must be justified further by a theoretical, philosophical

reason] would again (as in the discussion in chapter 9) confuse the philosophical level at which something

like the theory of objective spirit, the phenomenological justification of the Absolute standpoint operates

and ‘lived’ experience ‘on the ground’ (HPP, 279).

21 As Rawls made very clear in his discussion of philosophical deliberation as an attempt at reaching “wide

reflective equilibrium,” the method of Kantian constructivism he uses in order to elaborate the formal

device of an original position involves bringing into dialogue fixed, lay moral judgments as well as more

reflective and theoretical expert judgments. For Habermas use of counterfactual thought experiments

modeled on ideal speech situations, see his discussion of ideological consensus and pseudo compromise in

Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975) and, more recently, his critique of positive (enhancing)

forms of genetic engineering in The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).